Where there's a wiki, there's a way

Since I don't work in a library I will be going to be using Odum Library which is an academic library as my guinea pig.  Odum Library has a total of 44 staff members and is a part of Valdosta State University.  VSU's campus has it's over 9,000 undergraduates and just over 2,200 graduate students according to our website.  There are 51.9% White students, 35.8% Black/African American, 4.9% Hispanic, 3.0% Multiracial, 2.7% Asian, 1.2% Unknown, .2% American Indian/Alaskan Native, and .2% Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.  Our student population also breaks down into 59.1% Female and 40.9% Male.

I use wikis all the time when it comes to looking up current gear in Diablo 3 or what happened in the latest arc in an anime that I haven't kept up with.  And of course Wikipedia is high up there as well.  The ability to have a large amount of information on one particular subject is great.  You don't have to go all around searching for snippets from this website or that blog.  It's just laid out for you.  And if you're one of those who has obsessed over the all X number of seasons of Supernatural you can be a part of the information providing process.  Win, win in my opinion.

Where I see wikis really shining for libraries is the ability to gather and share information between staff.  Especially for new employees.  Figure out a best practice for social media that works for library that meet X, Y, Z?  Add to the wiki.  Need training to know how Odum library catalogs their video recordings?  Head to the wiki.  I actually would have really liked to have created a wiki for my previous job working in IT for the students that I needed to train.  They could have gone there to look up the information on how to splice an audio cable or how to hook up a Crestron unit.

All staff would need to have access to the wiki for reading and editing.  But paying for a license could be difficult due to budget cuts, so I would look for a free service.  Since the wiki is also going to be internal only and not for public it doesn't need it's own domain name.  Odum could implement a waiting period if they wanted for new staff (like 3 months or something) before they could edit to help maintain the integrity of the information.  They could also need to determine how many staff want to help, who has the time, and if any have experience.  The wiki would have training modules, information about the library and its practices, copy of the code of conduct, and other pieces of information that staff may need.

After going through the Choice Wizard on wikimatrix.org I ended up with 15 different platforms that suited my needs.  My choices for requirements were as follows:

• Page History
• WYSIWYG
• Professional Support
• No localization
• Hosted by someone else
• Don't need own domain
• Don't need corporate branding

I have decided to go with Wagn due to its module like nature, its affordability (being free), and support.  Compared to Wikia it doesn't have as many features but I think it has a lot of potential and some of those features could appear later on.  It also had been updated this year which I thought was a good bonus.  Wagn is pretty straight forward to use and editing doesn't seem overly complicated so even those who may not have experience with a wiki could learn how to navigate it.  I liked how they used "cards" of information which are like building blocks to build up a wiki page.  While the basic look instead much to write home about, their examples of wiki pages that people have created indicates the ability to edit the template to reflect whatever appearance you may like.

To check out some of the how to videos head over to http://wagn.org/how_to_videos.